Callimachus

Callimachus was a Greek poet, scholar and librarian of the third century BC who worked in Alexandria under the Ptolemaic kings, having been born into a prominent family in Cyrene, in what is now Libya. At the Library of Alexandria he compiled the Pinakes, a catalogue of Greek literature, and he wrote a very large body of work in verse and prose, of which only a small part survives. His main surviving poems are the Aetia, a four-book poem on the origins of customs and cults, six hymns, about sixty epigrams, a collection of satirical iambs and the narrative poem Hecale. He preferred short, learned poems on obscure subjects to long epic, and this stance, called Callimacheanism, became a point of reference for Roman poets such as Catullus, Horace, Virgil, Propertius and Ovid.